This film has the distinction of probably being the only one this year that made me think it would be good with its trailer, only to be a disappointment. It’s generally been the other way around in the last several months. It seemed to me the adaptation would bring with it a rich historical flavour, epic cinematography and a good cast, including the always-compelling Ron Perlman and Jason Momoa from Game of Thrones in the title role. It seemed like there would be a hefty focus on Conan’s childhood, giving some depth to what’s usually perceived as a campy and shallow property, developed from pulpy short stories through a Marvel comic to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film.
Personally, I had next to no experience with the franchise before this, having seen only a handful of comics and clips from the earlier film. So I came to it quite fresh. And perhaps I expected too much – the promising start was squandered by bad writing, cliché and comic book concepts that really were never as good an option as reinventing the property as a gritty and uncompromising world might have been. As it was, the film was not only messy but juvenile.
The childhood scenes at the beginning are really the only ones that work. Conan, born of a warrior mother on the battlefield, is much tougher than the other Cimmerian children at a younger age. He’s also more interesting than he might have been – more savage and brutal, a merciless killer in his early teens while still loving his father and trying to learn his lessons. When the village is overrun by a warrior seeking to reunite an ancient mask, young Conan swears revenge.
All grown up, Conan is a bit of a hero of the people, attacking slavers wherever he can in his quest for revenge. He finally gets his lead, and gets mixed up in the warlord’s final goal – getting hold of a girl with a pure bloodline and using her to unlock the powers of his mask and to bring back his dead wife.
Unfortunately, it all gets silly, messy and dumb – as well as horribly overlong. So often the writing is horribly lazy. Of course it takes exactly until Conan has grown up for the warlord to make his next move. The plot is driven on by the psychic powers of the warlord’s daughter. The stupid CG octopus instantly kills nasties but Conan and friends can swim away easily enough. And worst of all – the big bad gets everything he’s been questing for, the mask is activated and he can call back his wife…only for the mask to make zero difference and him not to think of calling back his wife until it’s too late. If the final dispatching of the antagonist is supposed to draw a parallel with a lesson Conan learned from his father at the beginning, and is somehow supposed to show he has tempered his fire with ice, it’s so clumsy it doesn’t work at all and I very much doubt more than a tiny proportion of the audience would get the intention.
There is also little to like in the characters. Conan’s misogyny is clearly supposed to be his little flaw that he gets over, but he never learns the lesson and doesn’t carry off being brutishly unsophisticated in that charming way that some characters have. Momoa looks different from his Khal Drogo role – much slimmer, no beard making him look much younger, but for all the muscle definition and leading-man looks, he seems far, far less formidable. His foil, the pure-blooded girl, is not interesting at all, despite some spirited attempts to make her seem a strong, capable female – she still ends up the damsel in distress and there’s no suggestion of Conan really respecting her, just desiring her.
A lazy, overlong film with too many silly comic book elements, it has enough bloody violence to desensitise and seem childish. This, coupled with the sort of setting where blood and entrails fly everywhere but there’s no rape and somehow, the hero slaughtering people is okay because they attacked him and work for the baddies, but of course have no little sons of their own who will come looking for revenge, it was typical Hollywood writing committee storywriting – in the worst possible way.
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